A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [72]
The Army Medical Bureau resented any interference or infringement on its domain and tried to block the commission from receiving official sanction. President Lincoln shared the bureau’s doubts over the wisdom of allowing philanthropists and women to interfere with the work of professionals.20 Yet on June 18 he reluctantly signed the United States Sanitary Commission into existence, remarking as he did so that it would probably be a “fifth wheel to the coach.” The commission was awarded an office in the treasury building along with a table and some chairs. Still fighting a rearguard action, the army medical chiefs succeeded in limiting its operations to the new volunteer regiments. The sixteen thousand regulars that made up the standing army would be kept safe from the civilians.
Elizabeth Blackwell’s name did not appear in any literature put out by the Sanitary Commission. Although she had been the initial force behind the volunteer movement, neither she nor the infirmary were invited to participate. “We shall do much good but you will probably not see our names,” Elizabeth wrote to her best friend, Barbara Bodichon, on June 6:
We would have accepted a place on the health commission which our association is endeavoring to establish in Washington and which the government will probably appoint—but the Doctors would not permit us to come forward. In the hospital committee, which you will see referred to in the report, they declined to allow OUR little hospital to be represented—and they refused to have anything to do with the nurse education plan if the “Miss Blackwells were going to engineer the matter.” Of course as it is essential to open these hospitals to nurses, we kept in the background, had there been any power to support us, we would have found our true place, but there was none.21
Elizabeth and her sister Emily accepted their exclusion gracefully. Elizabeth became chair of the WCAR’s nurse registration committee, and together the two sisters began to interview and select those who showed the most promise. Each candidate received a month’s training at the infirmary, followed by a further month’s practical experience at Bellevue or New York Hospital.
Dr. Blackwell had no doubt that her nurses would prove themselves in the field, as long as the well-meaning but catastrophically inept Dorothea Dix was prevented from ruining the enterprise. The fifty-nine-year-old veteran campaigner for the mentally ill had arrived at Washington in early May to offer herself as superintendent of army nurses. A lack of candidates had given her the position by default. Miss Dix was a “meddler general” without peer, complained Elizabeth. “For it really amounts to that, she being without system, or any practical knowledge of the business.”22 She soon confirmed Elizabeth’s fears: erratic, disorganized, and quarrelsome, she was a positive hindrance to the scheme. Most applicants were turned away on ludicrous grounds, such as being too pretty or too recently widowed, but Elizabeth’s trained nurses she dared not refuse.23
“If the Doctors would only do the part they have chosen and educate that material, we should have a capital band of nurses,” Elizabeth wrote to Barbara Bodichon in June.24 She also hoped they would accept the field hospital designs sent over by Florence Nightingale, but feared that the same chauvinism and anti-British prejudice that had led to her exclusion from the Sanitary Commission might also extend to anything originating with Miss Nightingale.25 There was nothing to be gained from being associated with England since the neutrality proclamation. “To be scolded now whenever I enter a friend’s house with ‘well what do you say to England’s behaviour … ’ is a great irritation to me,” complained